Into that Good Night

by Levis Keltner

  She sat up beside Doug, who was asleep with his arms at his sides and body as stiff as a board. Spending the night was cute—a first for Tiffany. She wondered if it’d happened too fast. Maybe fooling around was one thing and full-contact cuddling was another. She’d never slept with stuffed animals as a kid, the nap of their fur seeming to invade her mouth and smother her, and she was mildly impressed that she’d been able to sleep through the night. The boy was missing his large glasses, exposing his bare, placid face and a set of abnormally long, almost beautiful eyelashes. His sweet, resting eyes coaxed what tenderness Tiffany possessed. It wasn’t much. Doug’s overbite lent him the profile of a cartoon beaver and spoiled the sentiment. She didn’t want it to. Placing her head on his chest, she listened for his shallow breathing, his heartbeat, something fundamental to love about him. The early morning crickets were loud, though, and the thought of their crisp bodies encircling in droves gave her the creeps. Tiffany got really scared, then, of what she was and wasn’t capable of. Careful not to wake him, she slipped out into the cool morning air and stretched the cramps from her legs. Neither slowed her racing pulse. Doug was sweet, but not enough.

  That’s when she saw John in the fire pit—unmoving and gray as the dead in her dream. Out of guilt as much as concern, she screamed. Everyone woke. This included the not-yet-dead Dead Man.

  John’s joints were so stiff that the kids had to grip his icy flesh to hoist him out. He was filthy, arms and torso slick with ash. He clutched a chunk of mud that crumbled away into an old book. They wrapped him in blankets, rekindled the fire, and E. and Josué took turns rubbing his limbs until his jaw barely trembled. When he could speak, John told a fantastic story.

  He’d been the last night watcher. The trees had quieted. If the killer had stalked their camp, he’d fled hours ago. Just before dawn, a light appeared in the branches of the Big Tree. It was red and blinked in the unhurried and constant manner of a passing airplane’s wing tip. It spoke to John, not in the voice of the woods, he said, but as loud, and asked to be let inside of him. John closed his eyes against it. The voice quit. Still, its light bathed his face and hands and seeped through his eyelids. He called on all his strength and crawled to its origin—the hole dug by Erika. He watched the bottom. Red pulses rose and fell under the dirt, immense and deliberate as the breathing of a slumbering beast. John considered that he was dreaming or hallucinating while gazing into the campfire’s coals. But the fire had died hours ago. And when he stuck his arms in to dig out the light, the ash was cool and soft. He dug a few feet until he’d discovered the hardback book, a diary, which he’d read by flashlight until passing out from exhaustion.

  “Is it Erika’s?” E. was the first to ask.

  “No.”

  “Then …?”

  John looked away as he handed her the book. E. hurriedly opened it and searched its pages. The group closed around her.

  The diary was large and weatherworn to the cardstock. No dates topped the entries, written in a strange language with an intense, curling script. Only toward the end were a few words recognizable: “DIABEL,” “SZATAN,” “ANTYCHRYST.” Though the text was old, several pages were freshly annotated in red ink. Cryptic notes and diagrams filled the margins. The diary ended abruptly, the last entry abandoned mid-sentence, two-thirds of the book left blank.

  “Holy fuck,” Greg said.

  “You said it,” Tiffany agreed.

  E. calmly asked if John understood what he’d found.

  The guy’s squinting gaze faltered between the trees misting in the daybreak and the whitening sky. He seemed suspended in his recollection of last night, struggling to fully accept what’d happened as reality.

  “Abomination.” He muttered the word, sadly and with failure.

  For the first time, Doug wondered if John had killed Erika. It wasn’t a nice thing to think about someone. But the coincidence of finding the book, any evidence at all on their last night before giving up and going back to regular life, seemed unbelievable, suspect. The cops had scoured the woods for months. Were they really so incompetent? John was rapidly losing his mind out here. That or he needed to cut back on the morphine, or both. And poof—a creepy book appears that he alone plucks from a nightmare. Maybe the guy had only made up the story to keep the group playing pretend with him a little longer, to feel needed, important. Doug could understand that. Though there wasn’t a shred of shame in the guy’s demeanor. There was guilt and dread. Something had happened to him last night. Mud grayed his arms up past the elbows, as if the Dead Man had been playing in his own shit. And the way they’d found him. The guy had looked as if he’d dug his own grave and died in it. If a game, it was a deathly serious one.

  “It was here, in the last place anyone would look,” John said without meeting the faces of his friends.

  “It—this is … oh, man,” Doug stammered.

  “Was the hole half empty or half full?” Tiffany said.

  “On this point, we’d assumed incorrectly,” Alex said.

  “But what about … our fires?… and the broken shovels?” Doug said. “It’s too—”

  “That was probably a scare tactic,” Alex said, “a desperate solution to the problem of us. This place is important to the killer. He’s attempting to return to the scene of the crime, and we’re in his way. How then do we correlate Erika’s dirty fingernails? Possibly, she and her killer, maybe others, were burying and removing this book nightly. To read it? Translate it?”

  “What are the chances of that?” Greg huffed.

  Alex eyeballed him suspiciously, then continued, “Tiffany, do you remember any strange books appearing during one of your woodland soirees?”

  “What’s a woodland soiree?”

  “A party in the woods.”

  “No. Guess I wasn’t cool enough to get the invite. I’m kinda offended.”

  Alex leaned over E.’s shoulder. “These notes could be the—”

  Josué then snatched the diary and stepped out of the circle.

  “Erika—she die over this?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a paint marker. He threw it aside, reached in again, and pulled out a lighter.

  “I highly recommend not doing that,” Alex said.

  “Dude, J.,” Greg said, “I’m equally pissed. But I think we got to know what that thing—” he pointed at the diary “—is. Right?”

  Greg looked back at the group for validation. Their faces, gathered together, showed conflicting emotions. They trusted Josué, and they hated whoever had killed Erika. They wanted to know the truth, and no one wanted to relive the details.

  “La obra del diablo.” Josué sparked his lighter. A flame crawled up the back a few inches before extinguishing from the earthen dampness. He flicked at the wheel. The lighter wouldn’t keep a steady flame.

  Doug watched for John’s reaction, some confirmation of his involvement. All sense had gone out of the guy’s face. He seemed to barely notice the commotion. He hunched like an old man and stared exhaustedly through the trees at the original crime scene, as if he regretted talking the group into coming out here. Beneath the singed tops of the thin trees around the old fire pit, green buds of new growth showed around their midsections and had started to obscure the site.

  “It’s proof.” Doug stepped past Greg. “… of what happened here.”

  “Evil, yes?”

  “Evidence of it—of who’s involved … just maybe.”

  “Yes,” Alex came toward Josué and attempted a non-threatening posture: shoulders raised and palms upturned, but arms stiff in the sulky manner of a scolded child. “Listen to Doug.”

  “I’m upset … and really scared, too,” Doug said. “I want to stop him—whoever. There might be a clue, see? So we can get them—him—the killer.”

  “Do you want to solve this case?” Alex said.

  “Con justicia,” Josué said.

  “Me too,” Doug said.

  Josué looked the puny dork up and down, from the bad buzz cut
to the too-clean rubber of his shoes, taking stock of this kid who claimed to fight on his side. He looked like a child. Not too young for his age, he looked exactly his age, no hint in his clothes or manner or features that foreshadowed maturity. Josué imagined Doug might always appear helpless, as a child does, much the same as Josué’s uncle James, who jo-jo-joed for the family at Christmas Eve for as long as Josué could remember, costumed as Santa Claus. The man’s youthfulness made the polyester beard glaringly false, and the deflated red coat flapped around his slim frame. Each year Josué would express his frustration to his mother, saying that his uncle was too puny, better suited to play one of the Kings, and that he was ruining the mystery of Santa Claus by exposing himself as a fake and making Christmas into a big lie for all the cousins who still had many more years to enjoy the mystery. “When you were their age, did you see your uncle as this ‘big liar?” his mother would say and then tell him to shut up about it already. And why the obsession with Americanized holidays? an aunt would add. He was watching too much TV. Josué could say little in return because he did not remember the specific moment he went from believing to not believing. He knew only that he wished he still did believe the world was a place of magic, and—yes, foolishly—he blamed his uncle’s youthfulness for stealing his wonder. The association with his uncle made Josué trust Doug less than he already did. For the first time, however, the kid’s voice had some fight in it. Where was the little man’s fire when Josué was getting knocked around at school? Josué nodded, to himself really, thinking he sometimes possessed too much faith in the deep-down goodness of people, and he gave Doug the book.

  “It can’t leave the woods,” said the Dead Man. He stood in front of the fire with an eerie uprightness, Greg’s blue blanket toga-like across his chest.

  “It can’t?” Alex said.

  “No. And the book can only be read at night,” he said, relaying his pronouncements from another world. “It’s too dangerous, otherwise.”

  The kids scanned the woods, aware again that they weren’t alone.

  “True—” Alex paused to jot a note, looked around for dissenting opinions “—our work would be for nothing if this evidence chanced to be discovered by someone else now, including the police.”

  “Well, I want to read it,” Tiffany said. Satanic kind of crap reminded her of that night with Erika and Rocky and the blood, how sticky as syrup it’d been on their fingers and faces. “Or try to,” she said. “Maybe she left it here for us?” She meant Erika. None of the group needed clarification.

  “Tonight then?” Alex looked to John.

  “It has to be,” he said.

  John beckoned for the book. Doug gulped and glanced at the rotten cover. He’d helped secure it because, for a moment, he’d wondered if John had wanted it burned. Maybe he’d not led them out here to uncover evidence, but to bury it forever. Doug looked past the group. The sight was frightening, all the earth they’d churned under his command, nearly the entire valley. The book could be all that was left. John couldn’t destroy the evidence now. Could he? That would give away his guilt. Or was it all a sick game? Doug looked back at the group—he seemed to be the only one who suspected anything. He handed over the book reluctantly.

  Pulling the blanket around his shoulders, John went to the Big Tree and put his hand on the bark and held a brief conversation with himself, speaking to the sky in impassioned whispers. No one else paid him attention except for Doug, who believed he was witnessing the triumph of a crazy person who’d convinced others his delusions were real and to spend another night with him in Bachelor’s Grove with the object Erika had supposedly died over. The Dead Man disappeared around the trunk to secure the find in their new hiding spot.

  Whatever being out here meant to John, Doug decided, it wasn’t a game.

  Greg and Josué and Tiffany and E. began to discuss the lies they could tell their parents to manage two sleepovers in a row without raising suspicion. Doug felt the whirring energy in their chatter, as if something important were beginning. He stepped back from the group, refusing to be swept up in the lunacy. Tiffany offered several pro tricks, including jumping from her bedroom window. “I mean, we’re not children. How many times a night do your parents really come in and check on you?”

  Tiffany enjoyed the approval of their laughter, mattering for the experience she possessed, not in spite of it. She noticed that Doug wasn’t laughing, however, and came over and asked if he was still OK after last night.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” he said.

  “You look like you’re thinking too much about it.”

  “I’m not, really.”

  “Ugh, Doug, don’t bullshit me.”

  “I’m happy about that.” He smiled, though weakly, too anxious to feel anything but an ache like a hole in his stomach. He imagined John at night, preaching over Erika’s prone body. Too drugged to escape, she watched him close the book and pick up a long knife—

  “What else?”

  “I’m worried about us,” he said.

  “Just have fun and don’t take it so serious, OK?”

  “What if John wrote the book?”

  “The book of love? What are we talking about here, genius?”

  “The one we—that he found. What if he wrote the book?”

  “He is pretty good at speaking gibberish.”

  “Right, the guy’s insane. I’m afraid that he … What if … he was the one …?”

  “You’re sounding pretty crazy yourself right now. John’s weird, I get that. But he’s all right. I mean, if you think the Dead Man’s scary, truly scary, you haven’t met scary, yet.”

  “Don’t you think—”

  “You think too much sometimes,” she said and squeezed his hand, but didn’t kiss him.

  Doug almost went to tears. The feeling came from a yet unnamable pressure. He willed away the discomfort, telling himself not to think about what her halfhearted gesture meant right now, to not “take it so serious,” as she’d asked him to do.

  When they separated at the trailhead, Tiffany said she had to stop by a friend’s before going home, and she flashed him the same wave she gave the others before skittering around the rec center. He tried not to think about what that meant, either. Instead he headed east down 115th to take one of the alleyways home, while in his mind he traveled back through all the times the group had let John direct the course of their activities and they’d just gone along with it, glad to play their part for him, for Erika, and for their new and better friendships. The Dead Man had become a puppet master, pulling the strings in some screwed-up drama that seemed likely to end in their guts spilling under the Big Tree.

  Doug stopped in the street and clutched his belly. Even Alex, who really was a genius and should be smart enough to know better, had fallen for his act. Or otherwise knew and similarly feared John hacking them to pieces. Or otherwise was complicit, his Yes Man or Yes Woman or whatever, and couldn’t be trusted. Alex might even know that Doug knew, and together—

  Woot-woot, yelped a police car. It slid to a stop so closely that Doug stumbled back after meeting the officer’s face. The window was rolled down, an older woman in wraparound sunglasses behind the wheel.

  “You know not to be playing in those woods, little man,” she said.

  “We shouldn’t. We don’t, I mean.”

  “We?” she said.

  “Me and my—my best friend.”

  “What’s the friend’s name?”

  “Eh … John—ny. Jonathan.”

  “He still in the woods?”

  “He’s at … He’s home, already.”

  “And where’re you headed?”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Doug blanked. He couldn’t think of any place, but the woods.

  “You ever see anything strange in those woods?” the officer asked. She removed her sunglasses, her kind, hazel eyes narrowed at him. She had a shell of soft hair like his mother, but her face w
as craggy.

  “I don’t know,” Doug said.

  “Anyone or anything,” she said. “You can tell me.”

  “I—I really don’t,” he said.

  “Next time I see you here, I’m going to take you down to the station. And I’m going to call your parents.” The officer threw on her sunglasses. “And don’t walk in the street.”

  As the police car rounded the corner, Doug puked into the drainage ditch. He was empty to the pit. His sinuses were stuffed, which muted the world beyond his discomfort. He went up the alley, aware of little except the crunch of the gravel beneath his sneakers and the four spaces between his fingers where Tiffany’s had been.

  A block from his house, a cook in a beard net came out of the back of the new Middle Eastern restaurant and did a double take, seeing the boy lean against a neighbor’s back fence as if hurt. He set down his trash bags and called to Doug. Only then, the boy became self-conscious enough to wipe the spittle from his chin. He didn’t acknowledge the man. He didn’t ask his parents for help once home. He went to his room and didn’t message Tiffany or E. and stress his suspicions about John. Doug lay on the floor for a long time. He listened to himself gasp until his heartbeat slowed. He told his mind to stay as blank as the ceiling above. He had to pull himself together by nightfall. He had to warn his friends when the moment came to act.

  That evening, Doug’s family had dinner together in the living room. Never really together. TV bombarded their faces in ghost white flashes like paparazzi photographing dead movie stars. During commercials, he answered his parents passably about “the sleepover at Josué’s,” playing the role of a partially engaged fourteen-year-old. He even managed to smile when some funny nothing involving two characters having slept with the same woman happened on screen. Doug’s brother huffed, and his mother went, “Oh, no—oh, no.” His father held a beer absently and looked off into a corner of the room as if a small man down on the carpet called his name.